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How to Close More Sales with Salesforce Opportunities

As a Salesperson, what is more important to you than to close out more sales deals?

You may say that managing the information related to the potential deals and creating various quotes on that basis is important.

However, to be able to have all the information relevant to the deals, you need to be aware of the opportunities that are generated from your leads.

For this purpose, you need to monitor your sales activities from the very beginning.

A lot of your time in Salesforce is spent with the Salesforce opportunity object. This is why you need to give importance to the task of tracking the opportunities. Because they are likely to help you build a comprehensive dashboard.

Also, a fully functional dashboard is vital for appropriate tracking of all your sales activities.

So, in this article, we look at how you can track the opportunities till they turn into successful customers.

The objective is to be aware of the impact that Salesforce opportunities can have for helping you close out more sales.

Understanding the Key Difference between Leads and Opportunities

You may get numerous leads out of which many may not show any interest in knowing about your business’s products or services.

So, it would be a mistake if you consider all your leads as opportunities and plan accordingly. Before you jump the gun with your planning, you need to understand whether your leads are interested in knowing about your products and services.

That is the point when you realize that there is a great chance that these leads may become your future customers.

There will be leads that show curiosity or that are probably open to hearing about your products or services.

Also, some may even allow your team to showcase a presentation on the same. Both these types of leads are your “opportunities”.

Clearly, the number of opportunities will be less than the number of leads that you receive.

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Tips for Using Salesforce Opportunities for Closing Sales Deals

Customizing the Opportunity Record Fields

You need to focus on customizing your Opportunity object that will add value to your dashboard and sales tracking process.

This will ultimately bring more sales for your business. You can start out by customizing the following fields on your opportunity record:

Opportunity Stage

As the name implies, this field indicates the stage in which each opportunity lies in your sales process. It also identifies the probability of the sale getting converted.

This field further gives you a fair idea about your next step in the sales process. The best part is that this field will convey such information about the stage of every active opportunity that you have in Salesforce.

In a nutshell, you will know all that is happening with a particular sale.

Opportunity Type

In this important field, the standard values in Salesforce are “New Business” and “Existing Business”. These may be enough for your business if it offers only one type of service or product.

For example, if you are only dealing with web design, then you can make use of these standard values for your Opportunity type picklist.

However, if you also offer other services, such as logo design, content writing, branding, and e-commerce consulting, then it makes sense to customize the field with these values instead of only using the standard ones.

There is no one-fit solution for every business. You can customize the values for this field as per your requirements.

Just remember that the field has the potential to indicate which of your multiple offerings are getting purchased more. In this way, you can devise your marketing strategies for new leads and opportunities.

Primary Campaign Source

You can use this field to keep track of the most impactful campaign for every opportunity. It is a great way to maintain records of the relationship between your campaigns and the corresponding opportunities.

Of course, you can have multiple campaigns assigned to an opportunity, but only one can be tagged as the primary campaign.

This customization helps you understand the ways in which your marketing activities are getting you sales.

In short, you will know about all the opportunities (both the converted ones and the lost ones) that were influenced by a particular marketing campaign.

There are many other key fields that you need to explore, such as “Contact Roles”, “Amount”, and “Close Date”, while customizing your opportunity record.

Keeping Track of Lost Opportunities and Learning from Them

Everyone follows the strategies that work and try to implement the same for new leads or opportunities, because the probability of successful conversion is high.

However, you also need to keep track of the strategies (or the lack of strategies) that have resulted in more lost opportunities.

This helps you learn more and you can focus on getting favorable results the next time. The key thing here lies in understanding the mistakes you have made and rectifying them.

To record the reason why an opportunity got closed or lost, you can make use of checkboxes or a mandatory picklist field.

This ensures that the sales representative in your team who closes a lost opportunity has to enter the reason for the opportunity being lost.

The possible values for such reasons could be “competitive pricing”, “timing”, “no requirement”, “missing features”, and so on. This will make your sales representatives even more accountable and they are likely to work harder to make every deal work.

Obviously, if the issue is related to “pricing” or “features”, there is little that the sales representatives can do.

However, it would still give valuable feedback to the business to work on the reasons stated and to be better prepared for the next opportunities or qualifying leads.

We hope that the above information about how Salesforce opportunities can help you generate more sales proves useful for you.

Please feel free to share the valuable strategies that you may have successfully implemented for your Salesforce opportunities and thanks for reading!

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Published by

Ohad Oren

Ohad Oren is Co-Founder and COO of ONDiGO. Prior to ONDiGO he Co-founded several start-ups. Ohad has years of experience in Sales and Business Management. You can follow him on twitter on @OrenOhad
View all posts by Ohad Oren